Presently, for mobile IP implementations each mobile device is identified by its home address (i.e., at the mobile device's home agent) regardless of the mobile's device's current location. While the mobile device is away from its home network, the mobile device is assigned a care-of address. The care-of address identifies the mobile device's current location. The care-of address acts as a local endpoint of a tunnel back to the mobile device's home agent, and the home address. As such, mobile IP specifies how the mobile device registers with its home agent and how the home agent routes data to the mobile device through the tunnel (between the home argent and the care-of address).
Mobile IP has significant drawbacks. One drawback is that the when the mobile device moves out of its home location, the mobile device's care-of address is a virtual address. Hence, moving out of the home location requires a hand off, which changes the mobile device's IP address by adding a care-of-address. This is particularly problematic in IPv4 networks. Thus, connectivity is temporarily lost, browser session is lost, VPN session is lost, etc. In many applications (e.g., VPN, VoIP), sudden changes in network connectivity and IP address causes significant problems. For example, an SSL tunnel for on-line banking will terminate. Furthermore, the tunnel between the home address and the care-of address is a layer-3 protocol, and as such, the as the mobile device moves out of its home location the mobile device is no longer connected to the same network (i.e. LAN, subnet, etc.). Additionally, traffic must be routed through the home agent location. For example, if the mobile device and the data the mobile device is accessing are at the same remote location, the data must travel all the way to the home agent location and then circle back to the remote location, thus greatly increasing latency. Accordingly, current mobile IP implementations fail to provide a persistent IP address and persistent connectivity and efficient data transfer over a large geographical area. Hence, for these and other reasons, improvements in the art are needed.